Saturday, July 20, 2013

A recent study examines who is most likely to have sex with
someone else while they are in a serious but unmarried romantic relationship. I
am going to summarize the key findings for you here and give you a reference
and link below where you can read more if you wish.

This study on what researchers call “extradyadic sex” was
headed up by Amanda Maddox Shaw who used to work in our lab at the University
of Denver and who is now a graduate student the University of Rochester. (She’s
brilliant, by the way.) The authors of this particular study included Amanda
Shaw, Galena Rhoades, Elizabeth Allen, yours truly, and Howard Markman.

Okay, on to the study.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve noticed that in most
industrialized nations, people are marrying later and later and having increasingly
significant, romantic relationships prior to marriage. People who are seriously
involved with another tend to expect sexual faithfulness even though they are
not married. But how many people have sex with someone else when already in a
serious romantic relationship? And what are the characteristics of the people
who do versus those who do not have sex with someone else?

In our lab, we have collected data over time on a large,
national sample of younger adults who were romantically involved. We recruited
this sample such that, at the first time point, the participants were aged 18
to 34 and in serious romantic relationships that had lasted at least two months.
Recruiting was conducted by the use of phone survey methods (230,000 phone
calls were made to recruit the sample of around 1300 people who met the
criteria. You should have seen my cell phone bill that month.). Asking that people be in a serious relationship of two months or
more yielded a sample of people who had been in their present relationship for
an average of two years. So, what we are talking about here are people who are
already involved in important, ongoing, serious relationships. We have followed
this sample for five years, including through all the potential changes in
their relationships.The sample matches census characteristics for this age amazingly well. It tilts toward a lower average income, however, given that we recruited unmarried people in this age range.

What our team did, headed up by Shaw, was examine who was
most likely to have sex with someone outside of their relationship over a
period of 1.5 years from the first time point in the study. I refer to this as “cheating”
in the title of this post because that is what most of it would entail.
However, we are not able to tease out the small number of people who would have
agreed with their partners to be in open relationships where it would not be
cheating but it would merely be extradyadic sex. But most of what we’re talking
about here would be cheating in the sense that it’s having sex with someone
else where that would not have been considered “okay” by the partner. And even in unmarried relationships and dating relationships that have turned more serious, people have high expectations for their partner not to step out on them.

Based on some earlier work by Elizabeth Allen, Galena
Rhoades, and others on our team, Shaw looked at whether characteristics of the
individual or of their relationships tended to tell us more about who was most
likely to sex with someone other than their partner over time. In this sample, 14%
reported having sex outside of their relationship during the 1.5 years from
when they began participating in the long-term study. [Added clarification on 7-31-2013: People who had already had sex with someone other than their partner at the first time point were excluded from these analyses in order to make sure that the study was looking at what predicted future extradyadic sex over the course of the 1.5 years.]

What I will now list are the variables (in no particular
order) that we found to be associated with having extradyadic sex over the period of time studied (1.5 yrs).

Individual variables associated with extradyadic
sex

- Having more sexual partners prior
to the present relationship

- Greater use of alcohol

- Having parents who never married

Individual variables NOT associated with
extradyadic sex

- Gender (males were not more
likely than females to cheat)

- Age

- Education

- Religiousness

- Having children (with partner or
from prior relationships)

- Parental divorce

Relationship variables associated with extradyadic sex

- Lower relationship satisfaction

- Lower levels of dedication (commitment)
to the partner

- Higher levels of negative
communication

- A history of physical aggression in
the relationship

- Not having mutual plans for
marriage

- Suspicion of partner having sex
with other(s)

- Partner has had sex with another

Relationship variables NOT associated with extradyadic sex

- Frequency of sex in present relationship

- Satisfaction with sex in present
relationship

- Living together

I want to discuss a few highlights here and in my next post.
I will leave other interesting details to those who would like to read the
journal article written by Amanda Shaw and our team.

There are not a lot of studies looking at unmarried but
serious romantic relationships with regard to cheating. That makes this sample we
have quite valuable for addressing questions like this. Loads of studies look
at infidelity in marriage but few have looked at unmarried serious relationships
like we do here. With the changing times, what happens in unmarried
relationships is increasingly important to understand because these
relationships have massive impacts on peoples’ lives. I am not saying this is a
good trend, just that it’s reality. (For more on that point, see my post on “WhatHappens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, Right? Thoughts on Life Before Marriage,”
which I plan to update soon. So, stay tuned for that.)

Here’s a highlight from this new study described above. While
there are some individual characteristics that were associated with having extradyadic
sex, there were many more individual characteristics that were not associated
with sex with another. The big story is that the characteristics of the
relationship—especially the quality of the relationship—says the most about who
is likely to cheat over time. Those who were less satisfied in their relationships, less
committed to their partner, and who had reported more negative patterns of
communicating were the ones most likely to have sex with another. Contrary to
what you might have guessed, sexual frequency and sexual satisfaction with the
partner were not associated with cheating. Rather, the overall quality of the
relationship, apart from sex, is what mattered most--for both men and women.

In addition to the quality of the relationship, I want to point
out that suspecting one’s partner of cheating or knowing one’s partner has
cheated in the past was strongly associated with the likelihood a person would have sex
with someone other than their partner in the future. In other words, people who think or know that their partner has had sex with someone else are more likely, over time, to do the same. Some of that is just part of the relationships having lower commitment and some is doubtless revenge, but I'd bet more on low commitment being the big story there.

The headline is that overall relationship quality mattered
most in explaining who, in unmarried romantic relationships, was most likely to
step out on their partner. I will pick up on some of the (surprising) things
that were not associated with sex with others in my next post.

The project described was supported by Award Number
R01HD047564 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health
& Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the
authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the Eunice
Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development or
the National Institutes of Health.

About Me

I am a research professor who conducts studies on marriage and romantic relationships. Along with my colleagues, I also develop materials to help people in their relationships based on research.
In addition to academic publications, I have written or co-written a number of books (see below). Together with colleagues Howard Markman and Natalie Jenkins, I head up a team at PREP, Inc. that produces various materials for use in marriage and relationship education. Howard Markman, Galena Rhoades, and I head up our research team at the University of Denver.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three of the most important theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."